About this project

Your character will be fully customizable. You will get your own ship and be able to explore space and investigate inhabited planets with alien societies. Key to your gameplay will be the ability to morph into alien species and use their strengths and infiltrate their societies.

Your gameplay choices will affect the larger storyline and determine how you will be able to react to it. The game will progress from open sandbox toward a series of world events that drive you down a more linear storyline to an epic ending.

Location isn't everything, but it has a lot to do with your experience of this game. You'll be playing inside a cosmic fishbowl, fighting to survive.

ZODD THE IMMURE takes place inside a star cluster surrounded in all directions by an impenetrable barrier called The Immure.

The Immure is lethal to the touch. Upon contact, it shreds planets, detonates stars, destroys all life.

The Immure is also full of life. There are six intelligent space-faring species, including humans. Planets provide habitats for a variety of lower life forms. And Space itself is like an ocean with its own ecosystem of creatures well adapted to the harshness of zero-g vacuum. Just watch out for the space whales!

Each of the six intelligent species has a unique culture and technology. All have home worlds, except for the human race. None of them get along. The whole situation of so many alien civilizations being trapped inside The Immure is unnatural. Conflict constantly flares up over resources.

Two great empires dominate The Immure: one by brute force; the other through psychic powers. Humans are scattered throughout The Immure as indentured workers, traders, miners, household servants, and scavengers hoping to strike it lucky in the debris field of The Immure.

The Immure has existed longer than anyone can remember. No one knows why it has trapped this portion of the Zodd galaxy.

There are many theories – perhaps it’s someone's idea of maximum-security prison. Maybe it's a quarantine to keep whatever's outside safe. Others say it must just be a natural phenomenon. All anyone knows for sure is that The Immure is impossible to escape.

The existence of The Immure and the need to escape it are what drive our story and gameplay.

By the end of ZODD THE IMMURE, you will know why The Immure exists and what purpose it serves.

When you begin ZODD THE IMMURE, you discover that like so many humans, you work a dull meaningless job for a brutal alien race.

Until one day you decide you’ve had enough.

You quit your job and steal a spaceship, pursued by your brutal alien bosses. You hide in the debris field emanating from The Immure, hoping the danger of being so close to The Immure will offer protection.

Inside the debris field, you discover a key and a destination. That destination is a STATION. Stations are ancient structures that pre-date all known civilizations inside The Immure. No one knows what purpose they served. And like The Immure, the Stations are impenetrable.

But you have a key. When you use that key to access the Station, you meet something unexpected – HOST4. Your life (and your DNA) is changed forever.

HOST4 merges with your DNA and gives you an unimaginable power -- the ability to physically transform into any of the other intelligent alien races in The Immure.
You’ll look like them. You’ll have their powers and their weaknesses. And you’ll be able to level up their abilities and their technology by accessing the other Stations. You’ll even have an extra sense, specific to that species.

Changing into other alien races as you see fit opens up vast possibilities for gameplay and for your story.

How you use this ability and the other choices you make during the course of the game will customize your story.

As you explore and adventure, there will be a great degree of open sandbox play and freedom to the kinds of stories you can experience. But there will also be certain events that force you to make a choice – to select one option and NOT the other.

Then as your unique version of your story progresses, larger events will begin to spin out of control producing huge amounts of chaos, conflict, and desperation. The choices you’ve made along the way will set you up to handle it... or not.

If that’s not enough weight on your shoulders, you’ll discover that you are the only person who can save the human race from extinction. And that the only way to do that is to do something impossible -- escape The Immure.

ZODD THE IMMURE is a space sim. It has sandbox exploration and mission-oriented elements. It has linear and non-linear storytelling. It’s an RPG inside an RPG in which you must role-play as an alien. There’s a big emphasis on puzzle-solving to get inside Stations. And your choices individualize your story and have an impact on how you are able to deal with a series of escalating world events.

Outside your ship, you’ll be controlling your character.

You’ll have a third-person over-the-shoulder view. You can explore your environment. You can interact with what you find there.

You can explore objects in space and enter into alien societies. You will find opportunities to do mission-based tasks that will gain you certain powers. At times you will be in combat. You will also have the chance to ally yourself with those you meet. You will engage in complex puzzle-solving in order to enter Stations.

Depending on what species you are playing, your experience of these aspects of the game could greatly differ.

Character Gameplay

Change into five different intelligent alien species

Explore the environment

Interact with your environment

Interact with NPCs

Make story choices

Complete missions

Collect gear

Trade

Engage in combat

Gain experience as you do things within the game

Gain new levels as you gain experience

At each level, choose how you want to enhance your base character’s attributes

At each level, choose how you want to enhance your alien incarnations

Space will be large and expansive with lots to discover and interesting situations to play through.

The visuals are inspired by the post-Hubble images of what our universe is really like, but we’ll take it in a more stylized direction. For example, planetary scales are smaller so that we can fully create them and not just procedurally render generic worlds. You will be able to truly explore these places.

In space, you’ll control your ship instead of your character (unless you deploy your character for a space mission). Your ship is upgradable. You can also obtain alien ships equipped with alien weaponry and upgrade these ships. We want your experience to be as immersive as possible so you’ll be able to land and get out of your ship with seamless transitioning (no loading screens).

Like an ocean, Space has its own ecosystem of creatures. That includes predators. You might find your ship being stalked by something menacing or attacked by a sudden swarm.

Spaceship Gameplay

Pilot a variety of spaceships

Upgrade through buying new ships.

Upgrade weapons, engines, armor, etc.

Engage in ship-to-ship combat

Engage in ship to alien-space-predator combat

Mine in space

Explore and discover secrets and artifacts in space

Interact with NPCs in other ships & space environment

Land and exit ship by seamless transitioning (no load screens)

Stations

Stations are ancient structures that pre-date all known civilizations inside The Immure.

HOST4 will give you the ability to physically transform your human body into that of an alien species. You will have the abilities and weaknesses particular to that species. You’ll also have an extra sense unique to them that humans do not have. And you’ll be able to use their technology.

There’ll be a time limit as to how long you can maintain that appearance, at which point you’ll have to switch to another, maybe less appropriate alien species or revert to human.

Certain races will have different abilities that the player can call on to complete tasks and missions throughout the game. You may need to blend in with a local civilization to sneak into specific areas. or masquerade as a certain race to incite a war with a particular enemy. You may just want to change up the gameplay a bit by playing the game from a different perspective. All of these options open up differing possibilities for gameplay experiences.

But it’s not good enough to just look like an alien.

In ZODD THE IMMURE you’ll have to role-play inside a role-playing game. You’ll need to be able to pass as an alien in a culture that you know little about. Should you be a master or a slave? How many minds can you control without seeming rude? Was it okay to desiccate the prime health beast? Will they ever stop licking you with their stinking tongues?

Role-playing inside a truly alien culture is one of the great challenges of playing ZODD THE IMMURE. If you get unmasked as a fake, the consequences could be severe. Or good. Or just very, very strange.

The world of ZODD will feel alive through your experience of the rich diversity of living things: cities buzzing with activity, spacecraft going places, changing habitats, exotic weather.

The world will also feel alive because player decisions will affect the game itself.

We’ll do this by having a tiered effect system, where each decision could affect the storyline, the different NPC civilizations and inhabitants, and even the shape and feel of the environment. Every decision will have a consequence in the game, and players won’t feel like they’re just completing predetermined tasks in order to achieve an individual goal.

We are an indie studio with a small team. For quite a while, we've been dedicating our time outside our normal jobs to developing ZODD THE IMMURE. Now we want to bring what we have developed to the Kickstarter gaming community and see if people are interested in our game.

We know that our stated goal of $250,000 is not enough to make ZODD THE IMMURE. But we've come to Kickstarter literally for a kick start. Making our Kickstarter goal will allow us to demonstrate to our investors that there is a real demand for our game. We'll also be able to build a prototype to show how the world of the game functions. Of course the more we raise past our goal, the less we'll be reliant on outside investment.

Risks and challenges

We anticipate that all the usual problems of video game production will come up for us. Getting deliverables in at the quality level we need and on time – that’s always the beast that must be tamed. Our team has the experience to plan for these problems and the commitment to see the process through to a finished product. We have thought through the structure of our game in a way that allows us to actually build it, despite being a small studio. Our game universe will be expansive and full of detail. But the concept of The Immure provides definite boundaries so that we can control “feature-creep” and actually make it all happen. Technology-wise, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we think the best idea is to focus our efforts on making a game that is creatively distinct, original, and fun. For all of us, our sense of commitment comes from it being a very personal project, one that will allow us to put out a creative product outside the corporate mainstream. It’s not about a job. It’s about changing what we do with our lives.